“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
– Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (6th century BCE)1
This essay presents a journey of walking as intrinsic to artistic interventions and performances that transcend the boundaries between virtual and physical spaces while engaging with complex socio-political issues; showcasing a progression of artistic interventions that traverse digital, physical, and conceptual landscapes, step by step, provoking critical discourse and collective action towards social and environmental justice.
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dead-in-iraq
“America’s Army” (2002–2022) was a highly popular online video game/recruiting platform funded by the US Department of Defence to entice young people to join the US military. My journey into this online war-simulator, commenced in March 2006, aligning with the third anniversary of the start of the US’s invasion of Iraq. Entering the game with the avatar callsign of “dead-in-iraq,” I would join my platoon of other players, immediately drop my weapon, walk 50 yards or so into the simulated Middle Eastern war zone, stand still, and type, using the game’s text messaging system: the name, age, service branch, and date of death of each documented US casualty from the then ongoing war in Iraq. My message appeared on the screens of other players in the match, e.g., “[US Army] dead-in-iraq messaged: JASON J CORBETT 23 ARMY JAN 15 2007”.
When my avatar was killed, I continued to type while hovering over my virtual corpse. Upon respawn in the subsequent round, I resumed the cycle. This work was not just a protest but also a virtual memorial set within the dynamic environment of real-life gaming. It delves into the intricate relationship and blurred boundaries between gaming and the realms of military recruitment, death, memorialization, protest in the digital age, and the grim realities of warfare. Walking briefly into this game space in order to stand still without a weapon and await the death of my avatar was a core element of the intervention.
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Gandhi’s March to Dandi in Second Life
“dead-in-iraq” received widespread media attention, including a live interview on CNN. I often found myself responding to what were highly negative attacks questioning my actions. In early 2007, in one exchange with a detractor in a comments section from an article online, amidst a spirited defence of dead-in-iraq, he declared, “Dude! You’ve got a Gandhi complex.” While I found it striking that someone would think that being like Gandhi was some kind of psychological illness, this interaction sparked an idea that became my first deep engagement with walking in my creative practice.
This accusation became a catalyst for a new performance wherein I would become Mahatma Gandhi in an online game space, and walk as a form of performative re-enactment. It took some time for me to fully embrace this concept—I was quite nervous regarding the larger implications of me, a middle-aged white male, becoming Gandhi. Second Life, however, surrounded itself with marketing materials and a general zeitgeist that your second self, your avatar, was only limited by your imagination—their virtual world was a playground for exploring alternate, fantasy selves. I thought, okay, why not Gandhi? Like many historical figures, the myth surrounding Gandhi, has, in recent years, been re-evaluated—yet he remains a pivotal figure in the history of protest and arguably his performative transformation from solicitor to loin-cloth wearing pacifist was a highly effective and worthy of creative exploration in this context. In the summer of 2007 on a residency to the Banff New Media Institute, I had the opportunity to meet and work with curator Sarat Maharaj. Later that year in London, we met for lunch—I described to him the interaction where I had been accused of “having a Gandhi complex”. Sarat listened to my concerns and was supportive of my feeling that it was something that I should do. I moved forward to bring this idea to fruition.
“The Salt Satyagraha Online—Gandhi’s March to Dandi in Second Life” expanded upon my previous online text-based performances within online games. The notion of walking within game spaces had been on my mind for some time. Gandhi’s peaceful protest known as the Salt March, as outlined his autobiography excited me as something that could potentially serve as the basis for a powerful and thought-provoking re-enactment.2 In developing the Gandhi performance, I chose to engage in the then nascent online community of Second Life (SL). I further expanded the concept of walking in a virtual space by bringing the act into the real world, utilizing an adapted Nordic Trac “Walkfit Treadmill” as my game controller: thus my steps on the treadmill became my steps as Gandhi in the online world.
Over 26 days, which matched the actual days of the original march, albeit 78 years after Gandhi’s 1930 march, I physically and virtually re-enacted Gandhi’s historic journey, covering in total 240 miles. This was a live, mixed-reality performance which unfolded consecutively at Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in New York City and within Second Life. Me and my avatar, MGandhi, navigated this massive online world as virtual flaneurs, without a set path, meeting hundreds of SL residents over the course of the journey, many of whom accepted my gift of a walking stick, and joined the march. Spectators at Eyebeam were able to watch my progress on the treadmill and share my view of SL on a large real-time LCD projection.
The performance blurred the boundaries between the physical and virtual realms. A week or so into the project, I began to have odd moments of confusion when reengaging into physical reality. There were several instances after a day’s performance, on making my way back to my apartment in the East Village, where I thought I could click on people to get more information, or instances of walking down the stairs of the subway and experiencing a kind of déjà vu confusing my real environment with that of Second Life. This fusion of the physical and virtual realms also contributed to a profound emotional and physical connection to MGandhi and the virtual environment.
Observers remarked on the blurring of identities between performer and avatar, while participants in Second Life noted a newfound appreciation for virtual exploration. The performance left an indelible mark, altering my perception of space and identity in profoundly unexpected ways. I was fully engrossed in the use of my body to walk in the Gandhi performance; the durational, physical aspect of the work was deeply felt and played no small part in the transformative nature of this project. I also, for the first time perhaps, truly understood the power of performance art. It was Marina Abramović who said you don’t really understand performance art until you do it. I was hooked.
The Gandhi walk was a meta-activist experiment—I was not protesting anything in particular but exploring ideas surrounding protest, re-enactment, identity, avatar cosplay, and, of course, walking as a creative act. The experience of being Gandhi, walking on a treadmill and fully immersing myself within the online metaverse, was also lacking in certain respects. I missed being outside. Screens hold a certain space in my creative lexicon, but after this experience I wished to expand the reach of the work into real spaces.
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Project 929: Mapping the Solar
Cliff Chen, a senior energy analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists, has suggested that if a solar power system were built in the American Southwest, it would only need to be 100 miles by 100 miles to provide enough energy to power the entire United States.3 I was curious: what would 100 square miles look like and how might one illustrate this idea in a creative way? In 2012, I was living in Reno, Nevada, a city with over 300 days of sunshine a year, so much potential solar energy. I developed a concept for a performance that would essentially involve traversing the Nevada desert to make one large circle that would cover 100 square miles of space as a demonstrative, walking and mapping performance. My first thoughts were towards dragging a stick behind me to draw a line to delineate the space in question.
However, this idea wasn’t feasible. If I were to walk 10–15 miles per day, to cover the 400 linear miles marking a circle, this would take somewhere between 30–40 days, and at this time I was dealing with a family health crisis that made it impossible for me to consider taking this amount of time away from home. So what was originally conceived as a walking performance became a durational bike ride. The location shifted from the open desert to public roads just north of Las Vegas. The performance involved drawing a 400+ mile chalk line around the Nevada Test Site in Southern Nevada, the largest peace time military base in the world, which just happened to occupy roughly 100 square miles of space. Riding a long-tail bicycle, reconfigured with an armature to hold the chalk, I delineated a geographical area equal to the measurement of an imagined, massive solar farm.
Conceptually, this work was a logical successor to the Gandhi walk. I worked with Blue Mars Virtual World Platform, which allowed for a digital avatar of me, riding my bicycle, to follow my route on Google Earth Street View in real-time. The performance was an ideational and activist exercise towards representing another possible choice we could make as a nation, physically re-imagining geographical space for energy sustainability. And physically considering what we give space and attention to—militarized activities or peaceful energy production. While not a walking performance, Project 929 satisfied the desire to leave the virtual and go into the real world to conduct a durational activist intervention and performance, sharing a message of hope and possibility.
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The Redemption of John Muir
In 2017 I left the American West and the Nevada sunshine to relocate to Scotland. Soon thereafter, while on a train to London, I noticed a mural on the walls of the station at Dunbar, “The Birthplace of John Muir”. I had no idea that the great conservationist and “father” of the modern environmental movement (and revered figure of the American West), was, indeed, from Scotland. I began to read about Muir’s life and background. As Muir famously walked all over America and captured his walks in writing, this led to thoughts of perhaps conducting a new virtual and/or physical walk. I had also started to play “Red Dead Redemption 2”(RDR2), the popular video game set in a sumptuously designed visualization of the American West, circa 1899. I was honestly quite homesick at the time and found wandering the spaces of the game to be an emotional experience, as the landscapes depicted in the game were indicative of the Sierra Nevada Mountains that were literally in view of my previous home in Reno, Nevada.
The idealized landscapes of RDR2 are based upon those that Muir explored during his lifetime. The further I delved into the life and words of Muir in my research, the more complicated he came to seem. Muir has historically been a figure highly regarded internationally; his formative ideas regarding the necessity to preserve the natural world are widely influential. In recent years, however, his legacy has come into question, particularly regarding some of his writings and attitudes about Native peoples and African Americans. I began to think as well of my own position as a product of the American West and the fact that neither Muir nor my history would have been possible had not the indigenous populations of California been largely exterminated in the mid 1800’s.
What emerged from this thought process was an idea for a multifaceted online gaming performance involving the creation of an autonomous avatar of John Muir who would roam the open world of Red Dead Redemption 2. My John Muir would be speaking as he walked from texts developed utilizing an AI trained by inputting texts from a variety of sources including: Muir’s own writing in “My First Summer in the Sierras,” “The Mountains of California” and “Wilderness Essays”; and texts related to Native American history and genocide—“Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” “An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe” and “A Native American History of the United States”. The AI training would be rounded out by incorporating texts regarding racial reconciliation, decolonization, and self-help/actualization books about contrition and apology. The intent was to create what could be a form of virtual, historical, corrective reenactment—utilizing game technologies and AI to imagine what it might be like to have a chastened John Muir wandering through a virtual American West. The entire performance would be live streamed via Twitch.tv.
In 2022, I began working with a colleague to train an AI on the selected texts. This was a year and a half before the release of Chat GPT—we were working with earlier technologies to progressively train the AI, with the hope that we might generate a usable script. The resulting texts were interesting, yet something didn’t feel right. My thinking had initially come from thinking that this project would be an intervention into the history and legacy of John Muir, and that it would be justified to essentially appropriate thousands of words of texts as we would be creating something critical and new.
But I lost my enthusiasm for this project and for AI in the process. The ethical issues involved in essentially using copyrighted material without permission to train our AI simply began to outweigh any positive results. I remain very interested in this history and how one might use a video game and a re-created historical figure to express notions of decolonization and reconciliation. The methodology to do so, however—stealing the words of others, to make new words for Muir—seemed, when looked at critically, to be colonizing language in much the same manner my ancestors appropriated the lands of native Americans. I’ve since moved on from this project—something may emerge from these ideas but for now I have walked in another direction.
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Me and My Plastic: Walking with Ghillie Dhu
In 2019 I began collecting every piece of non-recyclable, single-use plastic that came into my life. What started as a one-month experiment, expanded over the course of a year to culminate in 6 large trash bags filled with my personal plastic waste, weighing in at over 25lbs. A Greenpeace study entitled “The Big Plastic Count” estimates that UK households throw away nearly 100 billion pieces of plastic per year and that only 12% of single-use packaging is recycled—each household on average throws away 66 pieces of plastic packaging per week (3,432 pieces in a year). Single use plastics are made from fossil fuels and contribute to increases in greenhouse gasses in every stage of its life cycle.4
I am transforming my plastic hoard into a wearable artwork, creating a “Ghillie Suit” made entirely out of the shredded, braided, and sewn plastics. My plastic Ghillie suit will be worn for a new durational walking performance, traversing 198 miles across Scotland from Broughty Ferry on the East Coast (where I lived at the time and collected all the plastic), to the wood at Gairloch. Gairloch is the location of the mythical figure from Scottish folklore called the “Ghillie Dhu,” a solitary male fairy, clothed in leaves and bark, who lives in the birch woods of the Scottish Highlands. From this mythological figure the Scots created what became known as “Ghillie suits”, full-body camouflage originally worn by gamekeepers on Scottish Estates; the first use in combat was by The Lovat Scots, a Scottish Highland regiment, in the Second Boer War (1899–1902). Ghillie suits are now widely used by military snipers, hunters, and are a regular feature in first person shooter video games.
My Ghillie Suit of plastic will be less about hiding than revealing. The work involves taking creative agency to quantify and acknowledge one’s personal plastic waste. This performance will explore issues surrounding environmental sustainability; the material reality of everyday life; discarded plastic; durational making/walking; performance art; public engagement, and Scottish heritage. This multidimensional performance underscores the interconnectedness of art, storytelling, activism, and technology, inviting audiences to reflect on their own consumption habits and environmental impact. I plan to embark on this walking performance in the Spring of 2025. For this walk, I will not walk alone. I am working with a game designer and programmer to create a virtual, AR (augmented reality) avatar of an imagined Ghillie Dhu fairy who will walk with me across Scotland—and at the end of the performance I will leave him forever in the wood at Gairloch.
“Walking is not simply therapeutic for oneself but it is a poetic activity that can cure the world of its ills”
—Bruce Chatwin—What Am I Doing Here?5
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Endnotes
- Tzu Lao, Dao De Jing, University of California Press, (2001).
- Mahatma Gandhi, Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Beacon Press, (1993).
- “The Energy Debates: Solar Farms,” Live Science, accessed March 29, 2024, https://www.livescience.com/3115-energy-debates-solar-farms.html.
- “Britons dispose of nearly 100bn pieces of plastic packaging a year, survey finds”, The Guardian, accessed March 29, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/12/uk-dispose-of-100bn-plastic-packaging-year.
- Bruce Chatwin, What Am I Doing Here?, Penguin Books, (1990).
Joseph DeLappe